6/29/10

Twilight's like soccer.

They run around for 2 hours, nobody scores, 
and its billion fans insist you just don't understand.
-Posted on twitter by someone smarter than me. 

It was during one of these bouts of male posturing that Kristen Stewart's Bella, refusing to choose sides, said: I'm Switzerland. And it hit me. I'd been seeing this story in terms of high school gangs - Sharks and Jets, or wolves and bats or whatever - but there's a much better metaphor: geopolitics.
Aging European aristocracy - Edward being 109 years old and downright Byronic - meets brawny all-American boy, Jacob - having apparently spent most of his 16 years in his tribe's gymnasium. Pasty, anemic Edward loves poetry and sitting in blossom-filled meadows. Virile Jacob likes hikes in the woods and sitting around campfires. I mean, sure, they'll be allies when the Germans - sorry, when the newborns threaten.
But they're basically from different worlds. Even their acting styles match up: Robert Pattinson's an English thespian, giving Edward sad eyes and a smile that looks like indigestion. Taylor Lautner's Jacob is such a chest-thumping Brando-wannabe you half expect him to yell: Bell-llaaaaaaaa.
The film around them has pretty scenery, pretty people, pretty wolves and pretty broad winks at the audience, including a jokey male-bonding scene atop a mountain in a tent. Bella falls asleep between her two hunky boyfriends, and they talk about the pain of love till the sun comes up. All it needs is a herd of sheep outside.
Director David Slade keeps the action brisk and the time-killing attractive. There are better special effects than last time, and Bella gets to be brave when it counts, all of which should be like a freshly opened vein for fans, especially as it results in "Twilight: Eclipse" ending up almost exactly where it started, weddings still to come. Can you wait?
       -Clip from the movie review by Bob Mondello on NPR

So maybe it is because I work in a treatment center but am I the only one who thinks that Twilight is a creepy and glorifies a disturbingly unhealthy relationships for teen girls.  Not only is Edward the controlling boyfriend who makes Bella want leave her family, friends, and any hope of a future behind their relationship is build on lust without common interest.  But he loves her a buys her cars and everything turns out alright in the end so that makes it ok for him to take over and control every aspect of her life because Bella is not capable of making "safe choices" for herself.    Is anyone else worried here?

Bella gives up a healthy relationship with Jacob and ties to her family and a foundation on common interests for Edward whom she literally compares to a drug and sinks into life altering depression every time he abandons her "for her on good."

Then there is the final book, with it's undercurrents of pedophilia.   Ummmmm, don't even know where to begin here except to say "who messed with Stephanie in her childhood?"  Making this into and ok thing just creeps me out.  I worried that everyone else thinks this is a perfectly acceptable definition of eternal love.

I'm just saying.
 -Me

1 comment:

dave, catie, and baby b. said...

i finally got my sewing machine!
i'm so very excited but i'm too scared to actually try it out without you here....wanna come play some evening??

hope everything is going great for you, all your creations are lovely!

call me when/if you want to get together.